Sexing La Mode

Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France

Bibliographic Data

ID19928952
AuthorsJennifer M Jones (0000-0002-1033-5563, corresponding author)
Year2004
Publication date2004-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueSexing La Mode (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford International Publishers Ltd. (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2752/9781847888860
OpenAlexW4242923488
ISBN9781847888860
Open LibraryOL51661575M
LanguageEN
Citations received17

The connection between fashion, femininity, frivolity and Frenchness has become a cliché. Yet, relegating fashion to the realm of frivolity and femininity is a distinctly modern belief that developed along with the urban culture of the Enlightenment. In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a court-based fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationship between women and commercial culture, public and private spheres, and morality and taste. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those particularly critical of this ‘vulgar’ obsession with ‘tawdry finery’, declaring it to be ‘merely the external mark of a depravity shared with slaves’. The story of how la mode was ‘sexed’ as feminine offers a compelling insight into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture. Jones examines men’s and women’s relation to fashion at this time, looking at both consumption and production to argue how clothing was becoming increasingly conceptualized as feminine/effeminate. A concise history of French fashion culture suitable for anyone interested in eighteenth-century culture, women and gender studies or fashion history

Aesthetics · Art · Cultural history · Enlightenment · Femininity · Literature · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Print culture · Realm · Sociology · Taste · Anthropology · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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